The Subsequent Wife

by Priscilla Masters

  In the end I needn’t have worried. He pulled up in front of the house, climbed out, opened my door for me and kissed me – on the cheek with cold lips. It was a strange and worryingly passionless expression which left me even more confused.

  ‘Good night,’ he said.

  I let myself in.

  TWENTY

  Through my window I watched his tail-lights wink and blink as he drove away, slowly, cautiously, while I digested the fact. Margaret was dead. He was a widower with no children. As I pulled my dress off I wondered if this evening would be repeated. Or had he seen through me, seen me for the damaged, sad little loser I was? I went to the bathroom, cleaned my teeth and lay on my bed for a while, thinking. I had met some very odd men. I thought I had understood all the types. But there was something about Steven that was different. Something strange. Not on the surface but buried as deep as a grave. Something was down there. I sensed it but could not put a handle on it. Should I be wary? Of happiness?

  We had a suicide once at The Green Banana. It was in B7 which I’ve never liked entering ever since. It still holds the dank, damp-earth, depressing smell of the dead. Is that instinct or a product of my imagination? His name was Ted and he was probably in his early sixties. He’d lived with his mum all his life. When she died he brought over an assortment of her old furniture: a longcase clock, a sofa that looked like leather but wasn’t, a 1950s’ Dansette record player to play vinyl on and a rack of old ladies’ dresses. It was a sad little collection but unfortunately not unusual at the storage facility. On the screens I’d watched him unload the stuff, one of the lorry men giving him a hand with the sofa. I watched Ted thank him and try and give him a note, presumably a fiver. Ted wasn’t wealthy. He wore cheap, chain-store clothes, well-worn, and drove a Skoda, also well-worn. As was he. He looked bent and battered by life. The lorry driver was a kind guy who worked for a local haulage company. I’d met him a couple of times. A fat, good-natured man called Lennie with a kind, ruddy face. Lennie shook Ted’s hand, clapped his hand on his shoulder and tried to tuck the note back into Ted’s top pocket. There was a brief toing and froing between the two men, Lennie finally accepting the note. But I knew later he’d put it in the Médecins Sans Frontières charity box that stood on the desk. Ted stood and watched as Lennie climbed back into the lorry. Even on the subduing black-and-white CCTV screens, I’d picked up that he’d seemed sad but surprised at the lorry driver’s generosity, both in his help and his reluctance to accept the money. Ted had paid up front for six months but one afternoon, not long after he’d moved in, I’d passed by B7 and seen him sitting on the sofa looking forlorn, so I wasn’t that surprised when a few weeks later he strung himself up by one of the steel beams that crisscrossed the store. I was the one who found him. It was November, my least favourite time of the year. Short days, getting shorter, dark by four, so when I checked my books I realized Ted hadn’t checked out. His ten-year-old Skoda was still sitting in the parking lot, waiting. I had a nasty feeling even before I went to check what was going on. Luckily, just before I’d set off on my rounds, Andrew had turned up to take some cash to the bank and he’d waited while I voiced my concern, so he was just behind me when I raised the shutter and saw Ted, dangling like a puppet, white and still hanging from the beams, his face expressing an apology.

  I felt weak and dizzy and fell back against Andrew, who’d already pulled out his mobile phone to dial 999.

  He half turned to me. ‘What time did he log in?’

  I hoped this wasn’t going to turn into a Blame Jenny episode. ‘Three thirty,’ I said, hearing a prickly note in my voice. ‘He nearly always stays for over an hour.’

  ‘In the dark?’

  I shrugged. ‘I guess he brings a torch or plugs a light into one of the sockets.’ None of the units had electric points. The plugs were in the corridor and accessed with an extension lead.

  ‘Mmm.’

  We waited.

  I saw blue lights flicker. The police were here.

  Within half an hour the place was swarming with all sorts of people, a police doctor and goodness knows how many uniformed policemen, and then finally, after a few hours, two guys came with a sort of stretcher thing and loaded Ted’s body into a black estate car with a curtain to hide the contents in the back. He hadn’t even left a note. But then who would the note have been addressed to? Me? Our customers don’t fill in next of kin so it would take a while for the police to track someone down.

  Our problem was we couldn’t rent out B7 until it had been cleared, and the police – God only knows why – wouldn’t let us empty it for nearly six weeks. And then, having had an inquest and Ted being buried alongside his ma, we were finally allowed to contact the next of kin (who didn’t want any of the contents of B7), hire a skip and empty out. A mate of his came and picked up the Skoda. There were still three months to go on his contract but we re-let it without giving away its past and never refunded the difference.

  Heaven protect us from another suicide. And it was strange but the person who rented B7 left after his initial six months saying there was something tainted in the air and he felt uncomfortable there.

  ‘Really?’ I’d said, faking ignorance and surprise when really I knew it was poor old dead Ted’s soul.

  The person who followed on after that, however, had no such problems. The ghost had gone.

  Something about Steven reminded me of Ted. Except I couldn’t work out what.

  The day after our date I hung around the phone, wondering whether he would ring. Would this be the beginning of a romance? Or would that be it? One date? I’d so enjoyed the warmth of a date, of having a man open a car door for me, of politeness and attentiveness.

  I watched the entrance obsessively, but there was no sign of the Ford Focus.

  The day after was the same and the day after that was a Sunday and I was aware he didn’t have my mobile number, only the landline to The Green Banana. I was preparing for this ‘romance’ to go the way of all others – in the bin.

  But on the Monday he turned up again. It was four o’clock and I was looking forward to going home when the white Ford Focus slid into the yard and he parked up. I watched him walk towards the door and wondered how I should respond. I had just decided on ‘neutral’ when the door was pushed open and he was inside.

  He gave me a broad grin, transforming his face from bland with small features, eyes, mouth, nose, into something approaching attractive, though not quite. ‘Jennifer,’ he said. ‘Sorry I haven’t been in touch. Work, you know.’

  I felt reassured. Wherever this was heading, the future looked brighter than anything in my past. What possible harm could there be?

  He regarded me for a minute or two, his head on one side, before saying, ‘Shall we go out again? I mean – would you like to?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Wait there.’ I watched him cross the yard and disappear into the store. He was gone for about ten minutes. When he returned, he was holding out another dress, draped across his arms, just like when I’d watched him from the corridor. Patterned this time, navy background with a splash of flowers, pink, white, pale blue. ‘Here,’ he said and held it out. I tried not to look at the label but saw it all the same. Parakeet.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  He nodded, smiling, and held it out further towards me.

  Questions were building up inside me now. I knew where the dresses had come from. But why did he have them in the first place? The obvious answer was that he had bought them for Margaret but she had been ill so had never worn them. But why had he kept them? That I couldn’t work out. She must have been the same size as me. A coincidence?

  I looked at him for an explanation but his smile seemed to have stuck.

  Our second ‘date’ was a blueprint of the first. We went to another pub, this time in Leek, a town on the edge of the moorlands just a few miles away. He asked me questions to which I gave evasive answers. And when I asked him questions he was equally evasive. I felt neither o
f us was being open or truthful.

  ‘The house where you live, is it yours, Jennifer?’

  I began with an evasive, ‘Sort of.’ Thankfully he didn’t pursue the subject. Not then. That came later.

  Over the next few months, Steven and I fell into a routine. We’d go out a couple of times a week. Usually to a pub, once or twice to an Italian restaurant, where I learned to twiddle spaghetti round my fork using my spoon, say yes to parmesan cheese and black pepper which arrived in an embarrassing grinder. A time or two we went to a curry house in Leek where I learned to order the mild ones. I recognized names of different wines: Rioja, Cabernet Sauvignon, White Zinfandel, Merlot. I knew which ones I liked and which ones turned my stomach to acid. I was becoming sophisticated. And well dressed. I now had five new dresses hanging in my wardrobe, a choice for every date, which he’d removed from the boxes in D5. I shoved aside the breathy whisper: You are dressing as Margaret. Wearing a dead woman’s clothes, clothes meant for her.

  I shoved the thought aside.

  He always picked me up and drove me home and, apart from a quick peck on the cheek, Steven Taverner didn’t make a move on me, which also puzzled me.

  And so it came to July. We were sitting outside a pub, a little farther away, The Mill near Worston, which had a river nearby providing a periodic backdrop of ducks and swans, and beyond that a railway line from which came the occasional whoosh of a train. The evening was balmy. I decided it was about time I started telling the truth. Or at least selected bits of it.

  ‘Actually, Steven,’ I said, ‘I have something to tell you.’

  He waited. I had learned that Steven was economical both with words and gestures. He was quite happy in his own silence, seeming to live inside himself. ‘When I said I lived in that house in Brown Edge, what I should have said was that I rent a room there. The house belongs to a couple called Jason and Jodi. They needed some extra cash and so decided to rent out a room.’

  He thought for a bit before responding. ‘Don’t you find that a bit strange, a bit demeaning?’ He looked at me hard.

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t have a lot of choice. I’m only twenty-three and couldn’t afford to buy somewhere of my own and this was a cheaper option.’ I felt ashamed. He would see me differently now. A scrounger. There was a silence while I pretended to be absorbed in the ducks swimming around. When I looked up he was looking pleased. Pleased? He was trying to hide it but there was a definite gleam in his eye. ‘Do you find you lack privacy?’

  ‘Of course.’ I tried to shrug it off but something snagged. I found it an odd comment.

  By the middle of September, I was troubled by the fact that our physical relationship had gone no further than a brief peck on the cheek at the end of the evening. Let’s face it, in most relationships you’re fighting them off not willing them on. But then I was learning new rules. Steven remained an enigma. I was even beginning to wonder if, in spite of his marriage, he was a closet gay, or else I’d lost my attractiveness to the opposite sex. Was he still mourning Margaret? He never mentioned her now. She remained locked in D5. And I had replaced her. He had given me a few more gifts, a peach-coloured nightdress that felt and looked like satin, the sort Hollywood movie stars swanned around in, fag held in a cigarette holder inches long. There was an odd dress, the least glamorous of them all, calf-length, brown with a geometric pattern, two blouses, a pair of cream-coloured trousers, loose.

  All the right size. Every time he visited the store I had another gift. They had obviously been stored up.

  Something else bothered me.

  I hadn’t told Scarlet that I was dating one of our clients. I didn’t think she’d have minded – it was something else. I hadn’t quite worked out what footing our relationship was on. Were we simply platonic friends of the opposite sex or boyfriend and girlfriend? Sex would have sealed it. I would know then. But instinct told me something was out of kilter. Maybe his long silences, which seemed more like absences. So how could I describe our relationship to Scarlet when I couldn’t describe the attraction even to myself? Not truthfully.

  Jodi and Jason were still fairly frosty towards me but I didn’t mind so much now. I had a boy – or rather man – friend who picked me up in a car and took me out for dinner. I was out a couple of nights a week these days and the rest of the time I was quite happy to stay in my room and read or watch TV. It was all fine.

  The big surprise (disappointment) was Stella, in whom I had confided. She was my best friend. When I’d been sleeping rough, I’d sometimes go round to her place to take a shower when her parents were out. (They didn’t like me, surprise, surprise; no one did in those days.) I’d have thought she would have been glad for me. I’d had such a catalogue of disasters that I imagined she would have been pleased that I had some sort of steady, decent relationship. But when I said I was dating an older man, one of our customers (without mentioning the dead wife or the container or the contents of D5 and certainly not sharing with her that we didn’t even have sex), she started the Spanish Inquisition.

  ‘Older?’ she snapped. ‘How much older?’

  I told her, wishing she would not make a seventeen-year age gap quite such an issue. I began my spiel about film stars and celebrities …

  And she jumped in with both feet and an expression of pity. ‘They’re film stars, Jenny, they don’t even live in the real world.’

  I’d always thought they did. They were always quoted in Closer magazine as saying life was quite ordinary most of the time. That they didn’t live on the red carpet but in the same mundane world as you or me.

  ‘Married? Divorced?’

  When I said, ‘widower’, she gave me a horrified look.

  ‘Someone sad.’

  ‘He isn’t sad,’ I said. ‘He’s just quiet.’ That was an understatement, but she didn’t need to know about Steven’s long abstractions or the way he tilted his head and listened – to what?

  Her next comment was even more insulting. ‘What does he see in you?’

  Truth was I didn’t know.

  And how could I explain that I was happy as I was and I had the feeling that if I tried too hard to analyse our relationship it would dissolve like sugar in hot tea?

  ‘Has he taken you to his home?’

  I shook my head. ‘But we drink in his local sometimes.’

  I hung my head and defended him. ‘He’s quite nice looking.’ Honesty prevailed. ‘Well – OK, anyway.’

  She just continued to look at me pityingly so I listed a few more of his assets.

  ‘He’s solvent. He has a good job. And a car. And he speaks nicely.’

  ‘Ri–i–ght.’ She annoyed me with her doubt and I was cross at having to defend him. My first properly decent boyfriend.

  She moved in for the kill with a dirty little grin. ‘Does he press all the right buttons?’

  Another sore point. He was attractive to look at but he wasn’t pressing any buttons. I wasn’t ‘in love’ with him. I wasn’t even infatuated. I just wanted someone. Someone of my own. Someone to take care of me, lift me out of my mundane life. I wanted somewhere of my own too. A home. I hadn’t had one since I was fifteen and I really did want this. I wanted to stop worrying about Jodi and Jason having a baby and throwing me out. I wanted to stop worrying about being homeless again and poor and hungry, having no job, standing at the bus stop in pouring rain, getting soaked and splashed by other people’s nice cars. I wanted a life. And it looked like Steven Taverner might just provide me with one.

  That would have to be enough. Stability, comfort, someone who loved me. There was something more. I felt I was being manoeuvred down a corridor. It was meant to happen, bound to happen.

  I knew he didn’t come with bells and whistles. I wasn’t ‘in lerve’. I didn’t hear lovely music playing in my head when he kissed me. I felt a big empty nothing. But I did feel safe and secure and comfortable in his company. When we weren’t together I didn’t worry he was dating my best friend. I didn’t worry he’d steal mone
y from me or do drugs or come in pissed and violent, being sick all over me. When I was in the car with him I felt safe, not worried he was about to erupt like a volcano and leave some poor sod lying bloodied on the side of the road because he’d cut him up. I didn’t feel frightened of him tying me up or being into kinky sex. Sex? That was where my thoughts stopped abruptly, colliding into one another like a motorway pile-up. I looked at Stella – my best friend – and couldn’t confess this one detail. Sex? What did that matter anyway? Did it need to happen? I couldn’t ask any of my mates and my mum had recently gone to live in France. I’d had a postcard from Chamonix without, I noticed, George’s name on the bottom. Just Mum, no address and one lonely, solitary X, so she wasn’t exactly on tap for parental guidance. And my dad was still currently surfing the Net for more Thai girls. The last I’d heard of him was a jaunty text – ‘Back in Asia’ – with lots of heart emojis and a couple more that bordered on the obscene. So he was hardly going to advise me on the sexual side of relationships. (I’m not sure I’d have either wanted or accepted any advice he might have given me on that score anyway.) I definitely wasn’t going to confide in Stella or Scarlet. I could hardly discuss our lack of a sex life with Steven. I didn’t want to embarrass him – or myself – or risk spoiling whatever relationship it was that we had. So it was up to me. I was on my own.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The nearest I got to it was one warm day, in late September, when we were sitting in the beer garden, again coincidentally, outside The Mill at Worston. We’d gone there early, to avoid the crowds and feed the ducks. Later on the place would be heaving on such a warm night, the hint of a dying summer in the bright gold that dappled through the trees. It was a pretty gastro-pub, film-set pretty. For some reason – maybe the tranquillity or the warm sunshine, the approach of winter with its long evenings and threat of snow or floods, or maybe it was simply the rural ambience of the place – I felt particularly relaxed and close to him early in the evening. I never felt threatened by Steven’s presence. His build was slight and he was only an inch or two taller than me. It was more what brewed inside him that could, at times, make me uneasy. His silences and abstraction could stretch into many minutes. I could not follow him down this rabbit hole so I had no idea where his thoughts were leading him.